A steadfast champion of his people during the wars with encroaching Anglo-Americans, the Apache chief Victorio deserves as much attention as his better-known contemporaries Cochise and Geronimo. In presenting the story of this nineteenth-century Warm Springs Apache warrior, Kathleen P. Chamberlain expands our understanding of Victorio's role in the Apache wars and brings him into the center of events. Although there is little documentation of Victorio's life outside military records, Chamberlain draws on ethnographic sources to surmise his childhood and adolescence and to depict traditional Warm Springs Apache social, religious, and economic life. Reconstructing Victorio's life beyond the military conflicts that have since come to define him, she interprets his character and actions not only as whites viewed them but also as the logical outcome of his upbringing and worldview. Chamberlain's Victorio is a pragmatic leader and a profoundly spiritual man. Caught in the absurdities of post-Civil War Indian policy, Victorio struggled with the glaring disconnect between the U.S. government's vision for Indians and their own physical, psychological, and spiritual needs. Graced with historic photos of Victorio, other Apaches, and U.S. military leaders, this biography portrays Victorio as a leader who sought a peaceful homeland for his people in the face of wrongheaded decisions from Washington. It is the most nearly complete and balanced picture yet to emerge of a Native leader caught in the conflicts and compromises of the nineteenth-century Southwest.

The events of July 19, 1878, marked the beginning of what became known as the Lincoln County War and catapulted Susan McSween and a young cowboy named Henry McCarty, alias Billy the Kid, into the history books. The so-called war, a fight for control of the mercantile economy of southeastern New Mexico, is one of the most documented conflicts in the history of the American West, but it is an event that up to now has been interpreted through the eyes of men. As a woman in a man's story, Susan McSween has been all but ignored. This is the first book to place her in a larger context. Clearly, the Lincoln County War was not her finest hour, just her best known. For decades afterward, she ran a successful cattle ranch. She watched New Mexico modernize and become a state. And she lived to tell the tales of the anarchistic territorial period many times.

Modern Navajo tribal government originated in 1923 solely to approve oil leases. From that beginning, the responsibilities and functions of tribal government expanded, fostering economic and political changes that brought the Dine people into closer contact with their Anglo neighbors. As tribal government undertook more projects, the revenue from oil and natural gas leases became key parts of the Navajo Nation's finances. This book is an ethnohistory of the changes wrought by oil. The economic development spurred by oil leases is a cautionary tale in the transition from a subsistence to a capitalist economy. The federal stock reduction program imposed in the 1930s and 1940s devastated the Navajo agricultural economy and altered family structure. Women had owned and cared for the sheep and goat herds which were now reduced in number by hundreds of thousands. Oil did offer some wage work, but only for men who dug trenches, laid pipe, or drove trucks. Following the end of World War II as the millions of dollars generated annually from oil and gas leases became available to the impoverished Navajo Nation, inter-clan squabbles erupted over uses for the money. Navajo was set against Navajo in disputes over lifeways and identity of the Dine people. This book is also an assessment of the price the land and culture of the Navajo ultimately paid for oil. Sadly, greater involvement in Anglo society meant less reverence for the land and sacred sites of the Dine.